If your favorite part of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings books or movies is the time spent in the Shire – the lush, verdant, and hilly home of the habitually hungry halflings who live in holes (albeit well-decorated ones) known as Hobbits – then I’ve got good news for you: Tales of the Shire might make you very happy, regardless of whether or not you already play and enjoy the cozy genre. I played an all-too-brief 20 minutes or so, split across two save files: one from the beginning of the game (post-character creator) and another from around halfway through. My takeaway after that time was exactly what I was hoping for heading into the hands-on: that Tales of the Shire is shaping up to be a relaxing, no-pressure, no-drama escape into the Hobbit hillside where your biggest worry is getting a new recipe just right so you can make a new friend in town.
First, I love the art style in Tales of the Shire. It’s bright, sunny, and overall just pleasant, as it should be. The village feels big without being overwhelming or annoying to navigate. On that note, I adore the designers’ twist on the compass or arrow pointing you in the direction of your current objective that so many games use (or, to compare it to another charming fantasy game, the golden breadcrumb trail in Fable): here, when you’ve marked a destination on your map, adorable birds will land on fence posts or tree branches ahead of you every 50 feet or so, literally pointing with their beaks in the direction you’re supposed to go. It’s a great unintrusive touch that keeps you looking at the beautiful game world rather than constantly pulling up the map. Music, too, is as mellow and delightful as you’d expect.
I saw the basics of the cozy gameplay mechanics during my demo: cooking, building relationships with your fellow Hobbits, as well as both interior design and landscape architecture. The latter two are the most simple, mechanically speaking, but also allow you to most customize your Hobbit home. Outside, I picked up a watering can from the garden, refilled it in the adjacent stream (which, by the way, you can also fish out of in other locations like off of a bridge), and then set about watering the plentiful amount of vegetables in my garden. (This, I should add, was the mid-game save that already had a rather impressive garden planted and thriving). From there you can, if you choose, rearrange the placement of your plant beds however you see fit. So if you want to have a nice unspoiled lawn on one side of your Hobbit hole and cram all of your plants into a dense garden on the other, go for it.
Inside the house, meanwhile, you can do the same micromanage-y levels of home decoration. You can move rugs, tables, chairs – anything that isn’t part of the foundation, really. Although even there, you’ve got options. You can choose the style of your walls, from wood patterns to wallpaper. But it goes deeper than that: you can even rearrange individual pieces of fruit on tables and individual books on your bookshelf.
As for cooking, that’s where the most gameplay I saw factored in. Hobbits love to eat, of course, so the best way to make new friends and improve your relationships with Hobbits you already know is to cook a meal for them. That first involves getting new recipes – after you’ve received an invitation in the mail for the meal, that is; effectively it’s how you get quests – then gathering all of the correct ingredients, and finally bringing everything together in the kitchen. You can choose how chunky or smooth you cut some things by pressing ‘A’ a certain number of times. A more complicated cooking moment I experienced involved adding just the right amount of salt in order to spice the recipe just right, indicated by a plotted point on a small chart in the corner of the interface.
All in all, Tales of the Shire was exactly what I was hoping it would be: a zero-stakes, relaxing time spent in the Shire. This game is set after The Hobbit but before The Lord of the Rings, so the Scouring of the Shire is still far, far away. But hopefully, Tales’s release is much closer in 2024.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of both IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He's a North Jersey guy, so it's "Taylor ham," not "pork roll." Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.
